Five days away from when we depart, and this is my final pre-trip required blog post, about my pre-conceptions, my hopes, and my fears about traveling to see London and Rome.
My fears are pretty well scattered. There are all the normal travel fears: place crash, luggage lost, getting pick-pocketed. All things that can ruin a trip (a plane crash would do a bit more than just that) but I also know that statistically speaking they are amazingly unlikely to happen. Especially if I play it save, keep myself protected, and don’t act like an idiot tourist while I am over there.
My more abstract fears are about my own reactions to the trip. Will I let down my normal veneer of cynicism for long enough to allow myself to be affected and moved by the things I see? Will I be able to allow myself to be changed by the experience? I want to be moved, to be struck, by the scale of the history I am seeing, by the beauty of the art and architecture. My ability to relax and let that happen is something I worry about.
Which feeds into my hopes. I hope to come back changed. I hope to come back with a broader view of the world. I hope to have my preconceptions of what London and Rome are like broken so I can see them without a layer of assumptions and US cultural imperialism in the way.
I hope to be moved by the art, inspired to write. I want to experience something. When I moved from Oregon to North Carolina it wasn’t an experience like I had hoped, too similar in many ways to shake me and make me pay attention to the world again, and the ways it differed were usually not pleasant ones (racism, sexism, religion, sweet tea, etc.).
As for my preconceptions, when I think of London I think of Arthur Conan Doyle, Dickens, Shakespeare. I think of fog, and punk music, and Jack the Ripper. I think of the BBC and Doctor Who (which is only rarely actually filmed in London). I think of the Great Exhibition and the Crystal Palace and Queen Victoria. Of the movies about Queen Elizabeth, about the Tower of London, about the Crown Jewels and heist stories about stealing them. About regency era romance novels and the Ton and the season and a House of Lords and of Commons, about actual aristocracy, titles and nobility, and Princess Di commemorative dish ware. About Buffalo Bill performing his western show for Queen Victoria. I only have a vague notion of what modern London is like, and that is derived mostly from the Hellblazer comic book or the Felix Castor novels by Mike Carey.
When I think of Rome I think of antiquity. Of an era of legions and terra obscura. Of Caesar and Cleopatra, of Pliny and Cicero, of the Punic wars and the triumvirate, Of giant statues of emperors, with the heads re sculpted as the power changed hands. Of the movies Ben-Hur, Cleopatra, Spartacus, and all the other sword and sandal flicks. Of mythology, lived and believed and being written and rewritten. I don’t really have an image of modern Rome, and my image of modern Italy in general is mostly from the crime film Gomorrah. The Vatican I can only picture in terms of news footage of the Pope.
It’s odd, right now medieval and Roman Europe is more real to me than modern Europe. My interests in Europe have always been more about the past, than the present. I don’t know if that is about to change or not, given the trips focus on Arthurian and Roman Literature and Architecture. I am not sure I want it to, there is a romance in those past eras that I don’t know whether it will be present in the modern cities or not.
Given that I just finished my other summer classes final assignment (The novel is done! Yay! I hate it and think I did a horrible job on it! Which is my normal opinion of stuff I’ve written!) I haven’t had much time yet to stress out over the trip. I am looking forward to it, to see these cities I’ve read about. But I really just don’t know what to expect.
Hi Aaron,
Foggy London is waiting for you. I like the way you are open, seeking a fresh experience of a new culture. You raise an interesting point when, as American students of British or Classical literature, we come to a modern country that is, at the same time, steeped in a history that is both past and yet physically present. For the first time, I am doing some “contemporary” things in London today and tomorrow: going to a department store and to Kew Gardens. Perhaps that is really one of the unique experiences of being in Europe–the way the past and the present are less segregated into experience and thought/reading. I’m fond of a phrase the classics scholar Jeffrey Blanchard uses to describe Rome and which is equally fitting in regard to London: it is a place f juxtaposition and stratification.
Looking forward to exploring both places with our group–geographically and in our literary imaginations!
Meg
p.s. Once you get here, the fears seem all out of proportion to the quite routine experience of flying and mving through a modern airport. Safe travels!